Introducing Jiangieu

/ apps hanzi decomposition / 2 min read /

Jianggieu Mascot

If you are a fan of rare CJK characters like myself, you might have run into trouble to input your favourite character. Wubi is of course one of the workarounds, but even the most full Wubi dictionaries don’t have codes for all the characters that exist. That would make the input quite unwieldy, to be honest. At the same time, modern Unicode standard is a real treasury of rare characters, with CJK Extension F bumping a total number of CJK characters to almost 90 thousand. This includes not only most of CJK character variants, but also a bit part of Chữ Nôm (Vietnamese) and Sawndip (Zhuang) characters. Therefore, one rarely needs to fire an image editor to create a substitute for a rare character, unless, of course, you are creating your own new characters. Usually it is only necessary to find an existing character in the Unicode standard and then use a font like Hanazono Mincho AFDKO to display it. So, how do you find the character you need?

Enter Jiangieu v 1.0, a minimalistic web app that can easily find a CJK character by its components, or decompose it into its components.

It uses a database of Ideographic Description Sequences kindly provided by the same people who make Hanazono Mincho AFDKO font and can swiftly assist you in finding the necessary character.

Enjoy!

If you have any comments or questions about the new app, feel free to contact me by any means described in the About page.

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